Changes in people's lifestyles and eating habits due to modernization are leading to increased incidence of various cancers. In line with this trend, medical equipments have advanced so that a human body can be photographed by various newly developed diagnostic apparatuses to make an early diagnosis of cancer and locate the cancer cells, and then to kill the cancer cells using radiation treatment and the like or suppress the propagation of the cancer cells, thereby treating the cancer or alleviating the pain of cancer patients.
However, in the process of developing and manufacturing a new diagnosis apparatus, it is a very dangerous task to actually expose a human body to the diagnosis apparatus in order to check its accuracy or performance.
Therefore, in the process of developing various medical equipments and treatments methods, a phantom is used that is a model of a human body.
There are two types of such phantoms: static model and dynamic model.
Static model phantoms are used in x-rays or 3D-CT and the like. They imitate only the shapes of human bodies and not the movements.
Dynamic model phantoms are configured to imitate not only the shapes of human bodies but also the movements such as in hearts or lungs.
However, conventional phantoms are made in integrated forms, and thus it is time-consuming and cumbersome to manufacture a different phantom for every organ of a human body that may be different in size and shape depending on the person.
Furthermore, since a conventional dynamic model phantom is made of one type of material, the change rates are the same in any position, and thus there is a problem that it cannot imitate the exact movements of an actual lung which has a greater length change rate in the lower part than the lower part during a breathing exercise.
That is, such conventional phantoms have limitations in imitating various human bodies and situations exactly when checking the performance of new equipments such as 4D-CT capable of dynamic image photographing.
Accordingly, the inventors of the present disclosure have come to develop a new type of phantom capable of resolving the limitations of such conventional phantoms.